Breathe In
by DancingPhalangess
Summary: Struggling with PTSD, Beckett needs a quick fix. Burke says there isn't one. Kate knows there is. TW, SH. Post Killshot. One shot/complete.


**I've had this in my documents for like two years. It's taken me this long to get around to posting it. So, trigger warning for self harm. There's some descriptions in there.**

She asks Doctor Burke for pills, but he says no. It's not a quick fix, like she wants. Like she needs. He tells her to take herself off the case instead, not understanding that she can't. She's got to be strong because if she's not strong she's not anything. The rope she normally clings to with burned hands is now only a thread, and that thread is connected to work. To the routine of dragging herself from a sleepless night and into the precinct to take the coffee Castle hands her with a smile.

So she finds her own quick fix. It's an old, old comfort; one that eased her through the days of her mother's death when Castle's words were not enough to hush the never ending row of her mother's screams and pleas for her life. It calmed the raging storm in her mind so the wind blew more gently and the thunder was just a distant rumble. It gave her back the reins of control and the strength to take them.

She needs that now.

She doesn't buy it all at once. She goes to the dollar store and picks up a packet of individual razor blades, then the drug store for bandages and anti-septic cream. Her last stop is the supermarket for tissues. They sell everything she needs in each place, but she doesn't want to see the raised eyebrows of the cashier as she presents her bundle, the pity laced with disgust that she is all too used to seeing.

Then she returns to her apartment, calmer than she's been since she saw the frozen corpse with a single bullet through her forehead. She's calmer than she's even been since one tore through her own chest. Her would be murderer has not been caught, but she is no longer lying in helpless wait. She is going to do something. She is going to claim back her strength, her control.

The first one fills her with blissful relief, a hazy smile falling across her lips as she feels the fear drift through the open wound. It has been so long since she greeted this old friend that she'd believed she never would again, and even on good days she'd felt a pang of longing for the cold comfort of the sharp edges. But now it is back, and it is hers once again. Nothing is different, but she can cope.

She is safe.

* * *

The first pattern is a neat row above the gash opened by the glass. She figures there's already a bandage there so it will not be so difficult to hide.

She's wrong.

After yet another failed day, a shift of running on nothing but the high of the blades concealed inside the lining of her jacket, she turns to leave, Castle's offers of a full cooked meal at his loft left broken on the floor, and he reaches for her. His fingers clasp the bulk of the bandage and although he cannot feel it beneath the folds of leather, she can. She flinches before she can stop herself, a gasp falling from her lips as she fumbles feebly to catch it.

He lets go as if her arms are oozing venom.

"Kate?"

She needs nothing more than her name as a question to know what he's really asking, and she can read in his frown of worry and hurt that he knows it's more than panic. "I burned my arm," she tells him, the lie threading on her tongue without consideration. There is a ready pack of excuses tucked into a corner of her brain, thick with dust but still there to crack open, like an unfinished book waiting for its reader to return. "Last night, on the kettle."

She did that once. She'd reached to the cupboard above to find her favourite mug, one of her mother's, forgetting about the cloud of steam about to billow from the shaking spout until it ravished her skin like flames. Her stream of swearwords had not been enough to alert her father, sleeping off yet another bottle.

Because of this, she knows the lie is a good one.

He accepts it with a nod, but he doesn't try and stop her again when she walks away and she fears that perhaps it wasn't good enough.

After that, she contains it to a neat section on the top of her left thigh, tracing over the most faded scars so it does not spread too far.

It is a sickness and it must be contained.

* * *

Sometimes, she thinks she catches Castle staring at her. More than usual, that is. She shows him her straight back, her arched shoulder, or hangs her head so her hair falls in front of her face. She fears her secret is carved into her features, written there for his perceptive mind to see. Or at least his writer's one is enough to imagine it. So instead of allowing him to, she hides. She uses her posture by day, her tough words bitten with a stinging voice, and by night she scurries home and makes new marks on her skin so she can sleep.

She thinks the urge will fade when the sniper is caught, and it does. She no longer needs it for just a few hours of nightmare free sleep or to get through just a round of paperwork. But she has awoken the craving she had long ago put to sleep, and now the monster is hungry, starving, desperate for the coldness against her skin. She stops needing it every day, but she also stops seeing a life where she will never need it at all.

Doctor Burke sees after a little over a month. He becomes suspicious when she came into the session after he turned down her plea for pills, calm and wearing the composed mask of Detective Beckett.

"You seem to be coping better." The word 'seem' is not lost on Kate, who knows he is prompting her to explain, not trusting the woman he sees. She smiles, and for the first time since her evaluation, she lies to him.

"It was Castle," she spins. "He reminded me that that man only has my life if I let him take it."

"A wise man," Doctor Burke comments, but there is scepticism in his tone. Kate's smile remains. She cut before she came in, and she does not falter.

But just weeks later, he asks her, gently, if she ever feels the urge to hurt herself. She lies of course, but the question caught her off guard, and for a few stumbling seconds, she had only been able to blink at him, wondering if her secret burned hard enough beneath the denim of her jeans for him to see it too. She ducks away from his gaze almost as soon as she has answered, and she knows she might as well have unbuttoned her pants and showed him the pattern.

Still, she can always stop seeing him if she wants to.

* * *

Castle knocks on her door with a bag that carries the aroma of Chinese food. In the other hand is the DVD of 'Heat Wave'. Despite the urge to scar her skin that itches beneath it, Kate smiles. She opens the door wider and he steps inside with a matching expression. The flatness of her stomach reminds her she hasn't eaten much more than toast in several days and the Chow Mein that her partner is carrying looks as good as a lake in the dessert.

They don't bother with plates. Castle makes himself at home on her couch and pulls boxes from the bag while she sets up the DVD. She has her own copy, purchased on the day it came out, but it is hidden under her bed with all of his books. It feels so safe to have his shoulder brushing hers that she ignores that he is sitting just a little too close for a friend. She ignores, too, that his eyes are boring into the side of her head, even as she pretends to be concentrating on the movie.

He breaks their silence just as Nikki and Rook realise the paintings are fakes.

"Kate." She makes a non-committal noise under her breath. "Look at me." Her muscles are crunched tense. She doesn't want to look at him. She can't look at him. He will see, her secret will be there, scored in her eyes. Safe enough from a roomful of detectives, but not from the gaze of the man who loves her. But she doesn't have the energy to resist him when he cups her chin and twists it himself, forcing their eyes together.

She wipes hers clean and prays she is strong enough to hide it. Castle sighs, his grip loosening and thumb brushing along the line of her jaw. "You don't have to hide from me," he almost whispers, but she doesn't speak the words that spin around her mind.

Yes I do, Castle. I do have to hide, because if I tell you what I'm doing, how damaged I really am, you will stop loving me. And you can't stop, not yet.

She doesn't know why he hasn't already.

"I know," is all she replies.

He lets his hand linger there a little while longer before it finally falls and she nestles just a little closer to watch the rest of the movie.

She doesn't cut that night. Not because the urge isn't there, but because whenever she goes within five feet of her blades, she sees his face, eyes twinkling and filled with a love she has never deserved.

It's another week before she caves again. At work, they close a case, do the paperwork, and she turns down Ryan and Espo for drinks. She scuttles out of the precinct as fast as she can, her head bowed and her leather jacket coming around her like a coat of armour. She doesn't know why, but suddenly she wants nothing more than to be alone. She doesn't even want Castle. She leaves before he can catch up to her, ignoring his calls and feelings a sinking dread in her stomach with each one. He will not leave her alone.

But by the time he makes it to her apartment, everything will be back in place, including her coolness. But her heart gives a start at every noise, as if he is going to come gliding through the wall and catch her as the blade sinks into her skin.

He doesn't of course, but the sudden break of voices outside her door startles the razor deeper into herself than she meant it to go. She curses and grabs a tissue to stem the flow, but it is soaked in seconds and she can see white fat amongst the blood. She needs stiches, but she will never take herself to the hospital and show them the rows of scars. She would rather bleed out on her bathroom floor.

At this rate, it seems that is just what is going to happen. She gives up and just lets it bleed a while, even kicking off her jeans so she can stand up and wander freely around the bathroom.

And in a sick way, it feels good to let the blood stream down her leg. It feels good to leave small puddles of blood, and crimson footprints wherever she walks. It feels good not to trap the flow of her pain, but let it drip until it stops hurting, until there is nothing left inside her. She is so used to holding it in, she feels as if she can step off the bathroom floor and lay amongst the clouds drifting calmly through the sky.

The promised knock comes just after seven, when she is deep in the world of _Harry Potter._ It's another old favourite, one that is familiar and well used so even the creases and folds of the pages are familiar. She would have opened one of Castle's, but with a visit due, it would have invited a lifetime of teasing. She settles the book down in the middle of Ron flicking a dragon's heart at Draco Malfoy and rises to answer it.

She doesn't miss the surprise on Castle's face when she does. Or the smile that captures his lips at the sight of hers. He is baring no food this time and she is grateful. She still feels slightly sick from the fainting and attacks of dizziness leave the room spinning. She sweeps a bottle of wine from the cupboard and glides to join Castle on the couch.

When she hands him his wine, he blinks at her. The smile is still lingering on his face, but there's something twisted about it now and a faint frown is stitched between his eyebrows.

"You've cheered up," he comments, but Kate has been a detective long enough to hear the reservations in his voice.

"So?" she says, her eyes narrowing slightly.

"It's just you were upset earlier, and now you're…not."

She almost wants to tell him then. Tell him that's it's _good,_ that purges all of that bad stuff from her veins, that afterwards she is light and clean and almost whole. But he won't see it like she does. He cares too much about ruining her.

Instead she smiles at him. "Maybe I've had a bottle already."

"Have you?"

His accusation adds a little of the weight back on. "No," she snaps, "I don't understand why this bothers you."

"I'm glad you're happy, Kate. I just don't know where this came from."

She sighs. Swirls the wine around in her glass. Takes a sip. "I was upset," she admits. "I don't know why, it just…it happens sometimes." More than it should. "But then I came back here, had a bath, did a little reading, and now I feel better." She's not entirely sure he believes her, but his eyes gleam with his usual grin.

"Chinese or Thai?"

She almost faints when she jumps up to answer the door. She forgets the blood still seeping lightly from the open gash in her leg and it is as if she has jumped onto a bouncy castle. She stumbles, but Castle's there to catch her of course before she cracks her head on the coffee table. The frown of concern is back and he guides her firmly back onto the couch. He tilts her chin again, but this time he is looking for something different. Not a sign that she is still there, but a sign that she isn't.

The take-away man knocks again, but Castle doesn't seem to hear.

He is looking at her as if she is no longer his partner, but a gruesome serial killer with a gun to a child's head.

"Castle," she snaps to break his stare. "The food."

"Right." He stands as if he is an old, old man with creaking bones. He usually loves answering the door, especially at her place, where no one expects him, Richard Castle, but today he takes the food and almost forgets to even pay the poor teenager whose hopes for a tip die as soon as he looks at the haggard and somewhat familiar features.

Castle tosses the bag onto the coffee table with no effort to seek out so much as a fork and sits right back down next to her. Kate's heart is pounding inside her mouth, sucking all the moisture from it, all the life from her until she can almost feel herself beginning to drift again, her mind giving way to the utter panic gripping her. She needs cold steel sliding through her skin. She needs the sharp edge of the blade to sting the palm of her hand, just to feel safe. But that is what has finally shattered the rose tinted glasses he has spent the past four years wearing in her presence.

"Kate," she has never heard him say her name so heavily. It sounds as if it has stones tied to it. "Have you taken something?"

If she'd been drinking the wine, she would have spat it back into the glass.

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Like drugs?" She's staring at him with a spark of amusement growing brighter in her eyes, but he refuses to glance in her direction.

"I don't know, Beckett. Crack, painkillers, cold medicine. For all I know you could be shooting up in here. Anything, just tell me if you've taken anything and don't you dare lie."

"God, Castle, no. Of course I haven't."

"Really? Are you sure about that? Because you've certainly been acting strange lately. Disappearing to the bathroom for ten minutes at a time and coming back in a better mood than when you left, you're pale, withdrawn, you haven't looked at me in weeks."

Kate jumps up, the room spinning again, but she ignores it and rounds on Castle, towering above him so he doesn't dare even look up at her, even though it's her hands that are shaking in the balled fists at her sides. "I can't even comprehend what you're saying right now. Do you hear yourself? You're accusing me of shooting up in the bathroom just because I haven't been making moon eyes at you."

Then he is right in front of her, taller and furious. "It's more than that, Beckett and you know it."

"I swear to God, Castle, if you've told anyone else about this horse shit theory…"

"I didn't need to, you spend every day in a roomful of detectives, they've noticed there's something wrong too."

"But they don't think I'm on drugs?"

"They don't know what to think. None of us do." The anger fades from his voice. At the end, it sounds as if someone has thrown a stone at a glass window.

Kate wishes he was still shouting, she wishes he would grab her, shake her, scream at her, storm out. Anger, she knows how to deal with. It is his kindness that she cannot handle, the shattered glass in his own voice that splits through her skin. She has never deserved his devotion, his concern. And now all she wants to do is get rid of him so she can go and hurt herself again. She tells herself, to sooth the tearing guilt, that he doesn't need to know. It won't hurt him if he doesn't know.

But she knows that's a lie because he doesn't have a clue, and it's hurting him anyway.

Castle sinks back onto the couch, defeat dragging him down. "I didn't mean to yell at you," he says, quietly.

She almost laughs at him then because she's not five and she can handle being yelled at. She's sure given her fair share of it out in the past. But there's something about the hunch of his shoulders that stops her. He is more serious than she has ever seen him. Even the day after she was shot, when he came into her hospital room, he had a smile for her. Now she can't see his face, but she knows there's not one there.

"God, I'm sorry, Kate. You were happy and I ruined it."

Her face is warm and wet. She wants to wipe away her tears before he sees them, but she doesn't have the energy to lift her hand. She doesn't even have the energy to move to the couch. She just sinks down where she is, landing on the coffee table (it's better than the floor) and he finally looks up to her silence. She looks over his head so she doesn't have to see his twisting guilt at the sight of her tears, because she's the one that needs to be sorry.

He keeps coming back and she pushes him away, over and over. Maybe it's time he stopped. Maybe it's time she did.

She feels his fingers slip through hers. She neither pulls away nor returns his grip so he tightens his, pulling their hands into his lap and inching himself to the very edge of his seat so their knees brush with one another. He wraps his other hand around her too, so just one of hers is cupped inside his. "Kate," he strokes that back of her hand with his thumbs, "talk to me."

More tears spill. She can't stop them.

"Castle," she whimpers, "I don't know how to stop."

Somehow, she is entirely enfolded in his arms. His hands are everywhere at once, sweeping through her hair, holding hers, brushing away her tears. "It's okay," he promises. "I'm going to help you."

* * *

She tries to go back to coolness in the morning. She pushes away the bacon he has cooked for her and mutters that it's too early. She looks right past the smile that falls from his face and shatters on the ground and focuses instead on the foam on the top of her coffee. She takes it without, but Castle has drizzled a smiley face and the words 'Be happy'. Of course he has. He's Castle. He doesn't know how to be any other way. She wants to scrape it into the sink, but however much she needs to push him back out, she cannot quite bring herself to be so cold. Not to him. So she stirs it into her coffee and takes a sip that burns her tongue.

Good. She deserves it.

Castle is talking, and Beckett is ignoring him.

Until he takes the coffee out of her hands. Her eyes lift with the mug.

"Don't shut me out," he begs. "Not now."

But she doesn't know any other way to be.

Then she notices the bag. It's perched innocently beside her sink, as if there is no other home to be found, but what is in it is anything but. She recognises the brand of Advil she buys, flu medicine she hasn't used in years, sleeping pills and pain medication prescribed after her shooting and packets and packets of other things she didn't even know she owned.

"What are those?" she says, her voice weighted with stone, even though she knows.

"I'm not gonna let you do this to yourself any more. I expect you have more around the apartment, but I didn't want to wake you after you fell asleep."

She wishes she had her coffee mug back so she could wrap her hands around it and hide her shaking.

"I'm not on drugs," she speaks slowly, as if she has to control herself from screaming every harsh word she can think of. She was amused when he first suggested it, until she realised he was serious. Now it's humiliating, shameful. She wants to ram every pill down his throat and tell him to just stop. Stop taking care of her, stop acting like he could save her, stop loving her.

"You said you didn't know how to stop, Kate."

"Castle, I wasn't talking about crack!"

Although, it's not much different, really. She does it to get high. She does it to control the pain inside of her. She does it to silence the ever mounting scream that wants to rip from her throat. She does it because she wants to destroy herself. She does it because it's something real. She does it because she doesn't know what else to do. She does it to breathe, she does it to live.

"Then what, Beckett? What were you on about? How are you going to push me out this time?"

She closes her eyes, wishing he would melt away. Wishing she would. The world could afford to lose her, but it would be splashed with a layer of grey without him. "This," she sighed, "this is what I can't stop. Pushing you away, pushing everyone away, retreating into myself at every turn. I don't know how to stop being alone." Or afraid.

It's not entirely untrue. She just can't tell him about the ruined patch of skin on her left thigh, because as much as she can hurt herself, she cannot bring herself to hurt him.

She feels him: the warmth from his body radiating to hers, the brush of his thumb arching over her cheekbone, the whisper of his breath against her lips. Softly, carefully, he kisses the corner of her mouth. His fingers slip between hers. "Start small," he tells her. "Tell me what you did on Saturday evening."

She raises her eyebrows, as if he is not standing with his body almost touching hers. "Seriously?"

"Yes. Baby steps, let me into your life."

She sighs. Takes a sip of coffee. "I did some cleaning. When I'd washed up about three mugs, I got bored and did some reading."

Castle smirks. "I knew you were a fan."

"James Patterson, actually," Beckett shoots back.

Castle puts his hand to his chest, mock offended. "You wound me, Beckett." But then his face turns serious again, the playing at an end.

"You can tell me Kate. I won't think any less of you."

No, but she's starting to think less of him. Well, not quite. But she does want to claw his eyes out. "I'm not on drugs, Castle," she growls. "Take some blood if you like. Do a test."

He looks at her for a beat. Then he nods. "I believe you."

But she can tell he doesn't, not really. About the drugs, maybe. Not about anything else, though. And she doesn't believe him. This isn't the end of it. It never will be. Kate will never understand it, but he keeps coming back to her, no matter what she throws at him. He doesn't know how to let go, how to stop seeing her through a sea of diamonds.

Sometimes, she thinks he's just not going to show up one day. Not at the precinct. When she finally caves and calls him, he'll tell her that he's done. That she's not the person he thought she was. That she's not worth the trouble. Because how can she be worth this? All the pain. All the creases in his forehead that weren't there before he met her. She's not worth that weight, not on anyone. When he sees that, he'll be gone. He'll replace her with someone else. Someone better. Someone far less damaged, whose smile comes easily.

Maybe if she pushes him away just one last time.

Only he hands her a plate of pancakes with a smile and a flourish and she can't bring herself to do anything but eat them.

* * *

She sits at her desk and clenches and unclenches her fists because she just went to the bathroom (actually to pee that time) and she can't go again so soon but she's got the file of her vic down in front of her and her middle name is Johanna. It shouldn't matter but it does, even after all this time, and the woman even has a teenage daughter. So she flexes her hands, the urge like a bug beneath her skin, crawling through her blood. Poisoning it.

She still smiles when Espo and Ryan launch into petty bickering.

Later, she shaves. She gets into a shower so hot that steam clouds the bathroom, telling herself she likes it that way. And the razor glides so easily up her legs, that she's sure she can't be getting it all. So she presses harder. She stops watching what she's doing. And when she feels a sharp sting and sees the trickle of blood running down her shin, she tells herself it was an accident.

* * *

It's over.

Everything is falling, tumbling, crashing down around her and she's falling too. Down, down, down the rabbit hole. She doesn't end up in Wonderland.

Instead she ends up on some park swings in the pouring rain.

You hide inside your mother's murder.

You could be happy, Kate, but you're afraid.

She closes her eyes and lets his words run around and around, biting and nipping at her skin. Not because they hurt. Castle managed to reach in and seize hold of the part she hardly wanted to admit to herself. And it's buzzing louder and louder, along with their argument, along with the things he said, the things she said.

There's one way to make it quiet.

Kate stands in the lobby, shivering under the stares of the doorman. She can still hear Castle's voice, or what she thought was his voice, yelling for her. Only it wasn't his hand that had reached down to pull her back onto the building. He hadn't even been there. For the first time since she had met him, he hadn't been there. And that was enough to make her feel like she had let go of and ledge and was tumbling down to the concrete below.

Hours ago, she'd chased down her would-be-murderer. He'd beaten her and flung her off the edge of a building and now she's here, standing in Castle's apartment building. Now all she has to do is get in the elevator and knock on his door. She thinks she might rather take on the sniper again.

The doorman is looking at her now, so she forces herself to walk on. Just one more step, one more step, one more step. Then she's outside his door. It's an impenetrable barrier between them and it's not even the hard part. That'll come when, if, he answers.

He does. After forty two impossible seconds (she counts).

"Beckett, what do you want?"

"You."

She steps forwards then and he backs away, but it's her turn to do the chasing. She kisses him hard enough on the mouth to ease the burning beneath her skin and then he takes her in his arms, slamming her back against the door, closing it with her back. It hurts, but she doesn't complain. She can hardly feel the bruises her sniper gave her. Her jacket pools to the floor, then her shirt, leaving her in her bra where the vivid bruises scream, but he doesn't see them, not yet. Before he can toss her jeans onto the growing pile of their clothes, she stops him, her hands wrapping around his.

"Kate?" his voice is scared, tentative, like he thinks she's going to walk right back out of that door.

"You were right, Castle. I'm afraid. I like being broken. I hold on to my mom's murder so tightly because I don't know who I am without it. I don't know how to not be this person. It's comforting, in a way, to go back to it." She bites her lip, not knowing how to go on. Because that's the worst part, the bit she doesn't even want to admit to herself.

Sometimes, she just cuts because she wants to stay there.

"You need to know something, Castle. Before we…"

Then her fingers are at the buttons of her pants with Castle watching her, an almost hungry look in his eyes, but she doesn't think she's ever been in a moment less sexy or romantic. Maybe soon she'll be looking at the other side of the door again, but she doesn't think so. Castle's shown her time and time again that he's not going to do that.

The waistband of her jeans pulls tight against the open wounds, but she doesn't hiss. It's like the bruises, hard to feel when everything else is buzzing so loudly inside of her. But this is a different kind of buzzing. The alive kind. Castle's kiss has awoken something inside of her and she's not healed, she's not okay, she's not a lot of things and she doesn't think she's quite ready for this, but what she is ready for is to take down the walls. Or at the very least, invite him to join her on the other side.

 **I'm still not sure about posting this, so I'm just going to go for it. If you didn't like it, that's cool, but if you did I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me know.**


End file.
